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Architects: ogawaa design studio LLC
- Area: 25 m²
- Year: 2023
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Photographs:Akira Ito
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Lead Architects: Taishi Ogawa, Mariko Sakurama
Text description provided by the architects. In Osaka, there are usually cluttered and comfortable towns. Many of the residents who were born and raised there are attached to their own town. To be precise, they do not love the town very much, but may just be accustomed to the normal life there that has been repeated over the years. The daily scenes of these towns have no academic value and contain many illegal elements, but the strength of the residents who move things forward with a kind of selfish self-responsibility creates an extraordinary combination of ordinariness or a sense of security surrounded by noise, giving the city a strange sense of solidarity.
We designed the home of a person who had lived in such a town for many years to be renovated into a house with a store. We renovated everything about the nearly 50-year-old building except for the foundation, steel frame, and the east and west exterior walls, which are semi-integrated with the houses on both sides. Although the site is in a highly convenient location, it is only a little less than 30 square meters in area. It was originally a five-story building, but in order to eliminate the cramped space and reduce the burden associated with legal regulations, the second and third floors were made into two-story atriums, making it a three-story building. However, we created a terrace between the floors that can be used for maintenance, making it look like a five-story building.
Considering the stairs necessary for vertical movement to be part of the living space, we planned to place them in the middle of the residential floor. The entire building is loosely connected through stairs and atriums, but privacy gradually increases from the base to the upper floors, and it connects with the town again at the rooftop. The second floor can be rented out if the residents have a relationship they can trust. The blurring of spatial boundaries and the integrated facade design create a unique relationship between residents, stores, and the town.
We created a luxurious sense of openness and a direct relationship with the town while bringing the chaotic atmosphere of this town, with its mixture of old and new, into the house. This made the house feel special to the residents like a secret base, even though passers-by were passing in the immediate vicinity.
We combined materials that give a sense of aging and new materials to create an unexpected sequence around the stairs and a space that requires ingenuity in how to use it. This allows for real attachment and nostalgia to develop over time. We believe that as the residents continue to enjoy collecting the items and the experiences they will have, this house will be filled with a variety of noises and will become more familiar with the town.
Even if it is just the house that looks like junk to others, there is a space that is irreplaceable to the user. We aimed to realize an architecture that presents publicness, fostering an ordinary but rich townscape through private spaces that are loosely connected with the town with trust and attachment to it.
